Peer To Patent: government using social networking

Peer To Patent is Washington's first social networking iniative, using a network of volunteers to help figure out if an invention deserves to be patented. The volunteers, normally scientists and technologies, connect with patent examiners, and like Obama says, this "taps the intelligence" of the American public.

A few words about how it works:

The peertopatent.org solicits public volunteers to submit pertinent info, generally any "prior art" related to the invention.

Volunteers select themselves, which in practice works well.

The patent examiner works with the self-selected team, for example, they'd research the invention, uploading relevant publications and suggestions for further research for use by the patent examiner. Others in the team might comment on the relevance of submitted pieces of prior art.

Following online discussion, each team vets the submissions made by its members. The group votes on which ten submissions are most relevant and those are then forwarded to the Patent Office.

From The Economist (paid content): Peer to Patent builds on...the notion that practitioners and researchers within a particular field collectively have all the relevant prior art at their fingertips already. All the patent office needs to do, therefore, is to get that community to tell it what it already knows.

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, has endorsed Peer to Patent, and adds that it can be generalized to a lot of government:

Pressing a theme popular with Barack Obama's tech surrogates, Schmidt also waxed enthusiastic about the power of network technology to create a more transparent and participatory politics. "Government has not embraced, generically, the tools we all use every day," said Schmidt. "It's time." Pointing to the Patent Office'sPatent Office's Peer-to-Patent program for crowdsourcing patent application analysis, Schmidt asked "why is that not true of every branch of government?" The same "police of the Internet" who debunked political rumors during the campaign could be turned on key legislative and regulatory issues. "A lot of people care passionately about them," joked Schmidt, "and they obviously have a lot of free time."

Comments

[Delia]

re: "the submission of top ten prior art by the pool of experts, who collectively constitute the 'person having ordinary skill in the art,' --> it really depends on who gets involved (and stays involved) with this project and how good a job they do at it ... as volunteers...

it could be well beyond ordinary skill; this would, arguably, result in an "unfair process" given that some applications would be much more scrutinized than others...

Delia

P.S. not a bad idea if they could have enough like-volunteers commit to the project say a year in advance so that the "extra help" could be evenly distributed D.

[Mike Admani]

"Greatness means having a tech savvy President."